


A Good Man

by quigonejinn



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 20:21:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1401262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where the Super Soldier Serum causes lycanthropy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Good Man

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains sad, disturbing content. 
> 
> If you are screening for triggers, this is not the fic for you.
> 
> First posted [to tumblr on 5/22/13](http://quigonejinn.tumblr.com/post/51122457505/a-good-man).

1.

Steve Rogers goes into the serum chamber, and Steve Rogers comes out of the serum chamber.

"How do you feel?" Erskine asks, and Steve blinks.

"Good," he says, a little hesitant. After all the electricity, after all the pain, he thought that he might feel different. When he looks down at his arms, though, they’re the same skinny stick arms he has always had. He is still, in fact, still wearing his SSR shirt and khakis. His belt is still buckled, exactly as it was before the chamber.

"Dizziness? Nausea?"

Steve shakes his head. 

"Any different at all?"

After a moment, Steve takes a deep breath and lets it out. 

"I don’t know."

He can breathe easily; his back doesn’t hurt, and he feels surprisingly good. His throat isn’t even sore from the screaming he knew that he was doing both before and after Peggy tried to get them to stop the injections, and Steve realizes, belatedly, that he is rubbing his left forearm, where he broke it as a kid when he tried to get between some kids and a cat that they had cornered and were throwing rocks at. It didn’t set quite right, and when Steve looks up and around, he can see just how deflated the room is. The suits upstairs are muttering to each other, uneasy, and the medical technicians are nervous. Everyone expected something else, except for Erskine, who looks pleased. He pats Steve on the shoulder and turns away to write in a notebook. 

Then, Erskine gets shot; the remaining vials shatter, and Steve bends over the man, not the ruined serum. Erskine can’t manage words, but he has just enough strength to bring his hand to Steve’s chest, thin and curved. Erskine taps in the middle.

_A good —_

Erskine’s eyes close, and Steve looks up from the body, eyes hard and set. 

Slowly, the air around Steve starts to ripple. 

2.

It’s raining in camp.

3.

It’s raining in camp.

4\. 

"You’re going to wear a hole in the floor," Peggy says, not looking up from the report she is working on for Phillips.

Steve hesitates, then looks down.

"It’s a dirt floor," he says.

"Point holds." Absentmindedly, Peggy frowns and taps the pencil in her hand against the desk, and Steve looks at her for another moment, then shoves his hands into his pockets. He is wearing a SSR uniform, all khaki and brown, but it isn’t quite an Army uniform. He doesn’t have any, and he listens to the rain sheeting off the sides of the tent-slash-office. Most of the men are off at a USO show, and Steve can hear, faintly, the sounds of the recorded music. Cheering. One of the USO show girls is talking into the microphone, and Steve can hear the — whistles. He turns his face away. 

"It’s the 107th on the other side of the line," Steve says, rocking forward. It’s wet enough that the ground is starting to squelch. "Phillips doesn’t have a plan. All he does is sit in that tent and write condolence letters for men who could still be alive."

Over in the corner, in fact, are a stack of descriptions of lightning tanks that Steve is supposed to be collating and turning into something resembling a graphical representation they can take back with them to London, but Steve hasn’t touched them. He watches Peggy, and eventually she stops writing. Her mouth tightens, and Steve knows that he has an opening. 

"You said once that I was meant for more than this," Steve says, softly, coming to the edge of the desk where Peggy is working. He can see Peggy thinking about it; she isn’t looking up yet, but she is hesitating. She is thinking; she is considering.

Finally, she looks up. 

"How are you going to get thirty-five miles behind enemy lines?" she says.

Steve lets his breath out in a whoosh.

"That isn’t the part I’m worried about about," he says, grinning. 

5.

For the rest of his life, Jim Morita remembers the first time he sees the Captain coming out of the fog: pine trees, a narrow road, a long, straggling string of badly tired men struggling to make it to Allied territory. It takes Jim a full ten seconds to realize that his brain is not hallucinating things out of tiredness, then another fifteen seconds to organize the shapes something he can put a name to. Even after he can pick out a man walking next to the wolf that comes up to almost chest height on him, there is a part of him that resists believing. 

6\. 

There are no news reels. 

7.

The Howling part of the name starts a joke: what do you call a group of men so bent on revenge on HYDRA that they will follow a ninety-eight pound weakling who can, at will, turn himself into a four hundred pound bulletproof black wolf? For a while, they call him Steve in human form and Captain when he is in wolf form, but after the mission to St. Raphael, when he shifts out in front of their eyes, crosses the room in three strides and snaps out a handful of German in a voice that technically belongs to Steve, but they can see the Nazi base commander is actually more scared of the ninety-eight pound weakling, who has blood pouring over his right shoulder from a bullet, and in front of all of their eyes, the wound — the bullet —

They start calling him Captain all the time. 

Dernier picks the bullet off the ground, drills a hole into it, and wears it around his neck. He survives the war, so he calls it his lucky charm. 

8.

In this universe, there are no newsreels.

In this universe, Peggy Carter still walks past James Barnes — tall, good looking, dark hair — to smile at Steve Rogers. It doesn’t matter that he is four inches shorter than her. It doesn’t matter that the uniform fails to fit him across the shoulders. Every man in the pub turns to look at Peggy walking past in that red dress, head high, and after she goes, Steve has his eyes half-closed, not moving, as if he is trying to hold something in his mind. It’s a strange expression on a face that thin and narrow.

After a while, Bucky looks up from his pint. 

"Does she know?" he asks, quietly. 

Slowly, Steve opens his eyes. He is smiling. ”She was there.”

In this universe, there are no newsreels, and Steve Rogers doesn’t need a compass to tell him which way points north. Even when the sky is covered with clouds, he can find the moon; on the darkest night, he feels the magnetic field tugging at him. Nevertheless, Peggy Carter and Steve Rogers are on the back of an open-top car. Peggy pulls his head down to hers and kisses him, human mouth on human mouth. “Go get him,” she says, and in one fluid motion, full of eagerness, Steve Rogers turns away and shifts into wolf form. 

10.

In this universe —

11.

In this universe, Colonel Phillips offers Zola a steak dinner. Zola declines because he is a vegetarian, and Phillips eats it instead. He points out that the last guy that Zola cost them was the Captain’s best friend.

Zola considers this.

"He might have been at one point," Zola says, after a moment of reflection. "At this point, I’m not sure if — "

Startled, Phillips stares, and Zola tries, not very successfully, to keep the pride from his voice. ”I kept him in wolf form for days. I’m surprised your man was even able to turn him back into a human.”

12.

There is a black wolf in the railway car, tall as a grown man’s chest. It gets knocked into the corner, and the man in blue looks from it to the HYDRA soldier in an energy suit. The wolf looks dazed; HYDRA has been using higher-cycle energy weapons because bullets are no good against a werewolf. A quarter-second passes, and the black wolf doesn’t get back onto its feet. There is the high-pitched noise of the HYDRA suit charging up for another electrical blast, but it never connects with the black wolf: there are two wolves in the rail car. 

The energy blast goes wide, and the gray wolf tosses the HYDRA soldier through the hole it makes. 

The black wolf looks at the gray wolf. 

13.

"If he changes again — "

14.

The outline of the gray wolf wavers, but holds: the black wolf and the gray wolf look at each other for another moment. There are footsteps overhead on the roof of the train; the other Howling Commandos are moving onto the train, and someone shouts Captain.

The two wolves look at each for another moment. Then, in one fluid motion full of — something, James Buchanan Barnes throws himself out the side of the train. 

Steve lunges after him, but his jaws close on air.

"I kept him in wolf form for days." 

15.

Decades later, while very drunk with Falsworth in a dive bar in Panama City, Gabe Johnson admits that in his dreams, he still hears the Captain, howling and inconsolable.


End file.
